In this new post to DZone.com today Leigh Shevchik kicks off a series of posts looking at the "unknown databases" that PHP developers might not think about when working on their applications.

In this day and age, there a plethora of options available to us. In this three part series, I'm going to walk you through five alternative databases that you may or may not have heard of. [...] Whether you're involved in embedded development, OLTP, OLAP, massive scalability and storage or simple database-backed applications, you're not going to walk away with the same perspective that you had before you started reading these posts. So without further ado, let's get started with a look at a veteran of the Internet: Berkeley DB.

She covers some of the database's basic features and a bit about its history (available for years) as well as some detail on how requests to the database work. To make the connection from your application, you'll need to install the dba PHP extension. She provides two examples of code that uses the database - one that just connects and deletes a record, another that adds/removes/finds users from an "address book" database.